Looking for a Lasting Legacy
A Quiet Endowment of Principled Character to Future Generations
Based on the several actuarial tables I consulted recently, I have somewhere between four and twenty-four years of life remaining. Because of my pessimistic tendencies, my thoughts turned toward the low end of those widely varying assessments. Four years. That’s little more than the blink of an eye.
Four years ago, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine began. Four years ago, COVID-19 was still raging throughout the world, leading to 15 million deaths by the end of that year. Four years ago, U.S. District Judge James Donato of the Northern District of California was dismissing Donald Trump’s lawsuit against Twitter (not yet renamed X) over the ex-president’s bogus claims of censorship. (An irony surely not lost on certain targeted late-night TV hosts.)
Imminence Induces Deep Reflection
Four years ago, I still rarely contemplated my mortality. Now, as my health deteriorates, impending death—and particularly what might follow death—frequently invades my thoughts. Were my evangelical beliefs accurate? After I slip away from this life, will I find myself literally embraced by Jesus when His Millennial Kingdom commences? Or, God forbid, might I discover that I was wrong about hell being a myth while I cry out, futilely, for mercy as I begin my sentence of unspeakably hideous, eternal torture? Or will I simply cease to exist, with my decades of life having been mostly meaningless? (Younger readers, your time for such reflections will come in due time.)
If the last track proves to be the correct one, then how can I avoid disappearing into the void of absolute insignificance? How can I keep my memory alive?
If I had the time and the means, I could do as our current President is doing; I could try to get my name emblazoned on books, buildings, monuments, magazines, shirts, shoes, and anything else that is likely to survive beyond my remaining years.
Or, if I had the wealth, proclivity, and stamina, I could do as our nation’s former DOGE boss has done; I could try to keep my name alive by fathering as many children as time would allow. (Of course, my wife would have something to say about that. “No!”)
Choose Your Legacy
Or I could acknowledge that the best way to preserve a positive, lasting legacy is neither through plaguing the public with placards of my name nor through sowing my seed like some perverse planter of progeny.
The best way to avoid a meaningless life is to give one's life in service to others. It’s a simple truth that nearly everyone acknowledges but most struggle to fully embrace. And, I’m sad to say, it’s a simple truth largely lost on the MAGA crowd, most of whom—following their new messiah—view serving others with no repayment expected as “woke,” a practice to be shunned by “self-reliant conservatives.”
Their new messiah says, “I like money. I’m very greedy. I’m a greedy person. I shouldn’t tell you that, I’m greedy—I’ve always been greedy. I love money, right?”
When a man died in a fire at Trump Tower in 2018, Trump posted, “Fire at Trump Tower is out. Very confined (well built building). Firemen (and women) did a great job. THANK YOU!” He offered no condolences to the victim’s family.
When former MAGA “general” Marjorie Taylor-Greene asked Trump to invite some of Jeffrey Epstein’s victims to the White House so he could hear their tragic stories first-hand, his response was that they’d done “nothing to deserve such an honor.” And while he expressed his best wishes to Epstein’s accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell, he has yet to express condolences to—or any concern at all for—Epstein and Maxwell’s victims.
MAGA Chose the Wrong Legacy
MAGA disciples seek to emulate their new messiah who wants a Nobel Peace Prize to validate his significance even while he expresses not one trace of empathy for the tens of thousands of lives lost because he eliminated USAID, or the tens of thousands of lives lost because of his dramatic reduction of aid to Ukraine, or the thousands of lives lost and the millions of lives disrupted because of the needless war he started with Iran.
Donald Trump is a man utterly devoid of empathy or compassion, and he has fundamentally reformed the Republican Party and white evangelical Christianity—the two have become indistinguishable—in his image. MAGA—tens of millions of Americans—now reflects a man whose name will be remembered through the ages because of his shameless self-promotion and as a curse word because of the devastating harm he inflicted on the world.
As my final day approaches, I think I’m okay with my name being forgotten if my legacy is a quiet endowment of principled character to future generations.